The five mistakes we are called in to fix
Almost every remedial job we see on domestic alteration work traces back to one of these.
- Inadequate bearings. A beam that is strong enough still fails if it does not sit far enough onto the masonry either side, or if the padstone specified in the calculations was left out. Failures at bearings are more common than failures in the middle of a beam.
- Foundations that differ from the existing house. An extension founded shallower or differently from the building it joins settles by a different amount, and the crack appears at the junction a year or two later.
- A chimney breast removed with nothing supporting the stack above it.
- Trussed rafter roofs cut about for a loft conversion. A trussed roof is an engineered system, and cutting one member changes all of them.
- Work started before the design existed - which is how a wall comes down and then somebody rings an engineer.
Get the engineer before the builder
The single most useful piece of sequencing advice we can give. The structural design determines how a job is built - what goes in, where the support lands, what has to be propped and in what order - so it wants to exist before anyone is on site.
It is also considerably cheaper. Designing a support is a small job; designing one retrospectively around what has already been built, or putting right an inadequate one, is not.
What we need from you to quote
For most domestic alteration work this is all it takes, and it is usually a five-minute job:
- The address, and roughly what the building is - age, construction, number of storeys
- A sketch of what you want to do, however rough
- Photographs of the wall or area concerned, from both sides
- The spans - how wide the opening is, and how far the floor and roof above span
- Whether anything has been altered before, and whether there is paperwork for it
- Your deadline, if you have one
What it costs
Design work is quoted individually against what the job needs, and you get a fixed figure in writing before anything starts. A single beam calculation and a foundation design on difficult ground are not the same job and should not be priced as though they were.
Where an inspection is needed first - because something has already been altered, or something has cracked - a structural survey and report is a fixed £580 + VAT, with the report inside 10 working days of the inspection, guaranteed.